There had been the usual diplomatic exchange between the two governments on the subject prefacing a lengthy communication sent by Lord Grey--the new title of the British Foreign Secretary upon his promotion to the peerage--on October 10, 1916. Therein he repeated that the blacklist was promulgated in pursuance of the Trading with the Enemy Act (a war measure explained in a previous volume), and was a piece of purely municipal legislation. Moreover, the American Government was assured, "the Government of Great Britain neither purport nor claim to impose any disabilities or penalties upon neutral individuals or upon neutral commerce. The measure is simply one which enjoins those who owe allegiance to Great Britain to cease having trade relations with persons who are found to be assisting or rendering service to the enemy." Nor were the steps taken confined to the United States: "With the full consent of the Allied Governments, firms even in Allied countries are being placed on the statutory list, if they are firms with whom it is necessary to prevent British subjects from trading. These considerations may, perhaps, serve to convince the Government of the United States that the measures now being taken are not directed against neutral trade in general. Still less are they directed against American trade in particular; they are part of the general belligerent operations designed to weaken the enemy's resources." The burden of the note was that Great Britain maintained the right, which in the existing crisis she also deemed a duty, to withhold British facilities from those who conducted their trade for the benefit of her foes. This right Lord Grey characterized as so obvious that he could not believe the United States Government seriously contested the inherent privilege of a sovereign state to exercise it except under a misconception of the scope and intent of the measures taken. It would appear that the American Government gracefully surrendered, by default, its earlier contention that Great Britain had no right to forbid her subjects from trading with American firms having Teutonic affiliations. The American objections to detentions and censorship of mails by the Allied Powers, which were bent on preventing German sympathizers from using the postal service to neutral countries as a channel for transmitting money, correspondence, and goods for the Central Powers, brought a further communication from Lord Grey on October 12, 1916. It threw no new light on the subject, the bearings of which were dealt with in a previous volume. The American contentions, so far from being conceded, were themselves attacked in an argument intended to refute them. The Allied governments were only prepared to give assurances that they would continue to lessen the annoyances caused by the practice and were "ready to settle responsibility therefor in accordance with the principles of law and justice, which it never was and is not now their intention to evade."